a vinegary ripeness dabs fall's thirst--

an unnervingly tasteless demeanor

prevails over trees.

the strength of passing facts at their

feet, unprotective of experience.

what witnessed dwindlement looks like,

without appeal.

as for the rest, that stands to regard--

an understanding without imposition

will move across a prior transparency.

winter nears.

an almost normative nonchalance to his
absurdism--as if it's just fine because he's
doing it.
there he was, making good on what was
not--rather than what was there.
wala's quick brush of a gestured once-over, where gravity sank.
left pinky claw in his mouth, with the false modesty of a centerfold.
the frills of nausea knotted by abject terror & stage fright paralysis, was the confection of his presence.
buddy boy Beelzebub standing in the living room like: 'what do you think?'
a red-light district glow about him, Tartarean yarn's hypertrichosis, curly Tim Burtonesque horns.
unhealthy *****-colored eyes, with
see-no-evil reptilian slits & fangs that ate
their punchline.
he just stood there--coring out a cave of
grandiosity, then leapt to the refrigerator.
turned it on its head by tapping his claws on the freezer door, a little hunger strike.
grabbed the magnet of a Monarch Butterfly, forced a few flits & dropped it
on the floor as with the lot of them.
tip-hooved back into the living room & said: 'the lamp's bulb in your study needs changing--it's been driving me bat-**** crazy, I need you to see clearly so I can manipulate your knowledge.'
'Pretty soon you'll have two pulses & two heartbeats.'

you're a brilliant lover--below pinned down at the brink, above pinned up at
the brink.
circles to the contrary--more perfect than
circles, broken out of with an ache.
so susceptible to more reciprocation...
curled talons holding it.
you have no recollection how you got up there, the sky is synonymous with you--
not the other way around.
it's enclosed to the contrary.
your freedom retention pulled complety thru air--feathers band to your flesh, wings band to your will.
it never occurred to you as an active force--which's why it belongs to you.
you're already where you appear to be
going, one sees--but one cannot see you there.
it feels too **** good, only you can hold
it.
you're probably waiting till your eyes close to let it out.

a hermit well to the bone--dressed like
a beast in the birthright of elements.
lies four times removed from breath,
with his back on a stream.
puddied face wrinkled like a treestump,
frizz-bale beard, a kingdom's expendable.
stiffly resolute with communions of
sunless light, all he let live--lives him
hereafter.
untouched by the temporal, the long of
his lay will be discovered during the long
of his lay.
a whistling wodnesse will come like
Ariadne's thread from castle walls,
Boschians will leave no sympathy card
from the blazes.
the hermit will have simply been a
feature of the landscape.
if want was a thing at all for him, it was
to be as it is.
his decomposition will be as his favorite
verses, revisited while coming away with
newer & deeper meaning.
a holy pandemonium in a most unlikely
place--a bird for every other bird that
passes it on.

morbid curiosity is a luxury--the art of
the Middle Ages lifts the ground to meet
its vertigo, as huntsmen signal toward
the observer.
the gamey odorousness of fear downwind.
nerve endings drafted their maps, unable
to find a way out.
dread gathered wood & chopped it untiringly.
reacquainted shame scrambled for leafage again--under a greater Fall.
a potion goblet for every kind.
a unicorn on a green velvet hill, became
visible in the current of a squirrel's tail.
there was never not magick.
though digression can be as quiet as an
exiting servant.
depictions of persons hardened as they softened, a very peculiar ethereality.
the look of snow as soon as it stops.
a bud held tight in one's palm, just as
it's about to bloom.
it is this, from crown to soles--what a
mottled column of light to move in.
from nobility to peasantry, something
burst in on clay--they couldn't be natural even when they felt they were.
animals do not take a headcount in a
burning stable, they even forget to say grace.

they had to exorcise it--that thing in the air, that thing in the water.
earth, then something other--that's how
it happened.
not the dance instruction of a tarantula to sweat out venom, but by the lived
eschatology of medievals.
worked off in mass dances (tarantism)--
till exhaustion/death.
as if they were the herd of swine that
evil spirits were cast into.
the Gadarene demoniac which Jesus
eighty sixed, caught sniffing around tombs, en route the left-hand path.
bells rung by flies, leeches bled out the: I, flames ran up the: I--heresy!
blood/yellow bile/black bile/phlegm--
the slop bucket fluids of: The Four Humours.
corresponding to the four dispositions, the four ages, the four elements--a feast
of fools attempting to psych-out wodnesse.
as medievals finger-pointed in their sleep, exacerbating toothless drool while
giving over a name.
smoky villages trampled with commotion, then nothing--closed doors taking on a
life of their own.
peace like a frozen juggler, beside a breathless flutist, you could trip over prayer only to look up at an inquisitor.

cold is the most seasonal--the only

condition of: The Alone.

its savage independence blisters with

maturity, assures a begrudging respect

& admiration.

it's the embodiment of nothing but

what is not.

where the senses are taken one by one,

as with the last to go--you can hear white.

its solitude is hand-picked by what

cannot withstand it.

nothing else smells so fresh as it touches

your bones.